Other potential topics

PVM

how much separate libraries would we target? e.g. pvm, bpmn, task, identity, persistent-api

how would the API look like? now processEngine.getXxxxService()

how would the docs be structured?

how would the links between task completion and process continuation be implemented?

how to offer the test helper method implementations?

API

Configuration, initialization of process engines

Currently there is the strategy of setup building jars containing configurations. There is the programmatic creation of a process engine, there is the ProcessEngines registry and the servlet for automatic initialization.

We should establish a common strategy on how we deal with configuration files and initialization.

Following aspects should be considered and as much as possible unified:

Test APIs

Should the test utilities and APIs be split off into a separate project? Would mean only unit tests in activiti-engine (but that's the way it is now anyway).

DB persistence

Current architecture

Alternatives

JSON serialization into DB

Cloud bigtable persistence

Is the current architecture OK for 5.0?

BPMN compatibility

Biggest question around BPMN is the suitability for developers. jPDL was much more readable. Will BPMN shortcut suffice? Will just have to take the pain of a verbose language? Or do we need to go for usability, compactness and readability without compromises.

How do we make it easy for users to work with all these namespaces (if we decide to put custom conveniences in namespaces)

Is there a clear scope we can target? Simple or descriptive conformance? Maybe Bernd could prepare this topic as he's closest to the spec. But most important is not the knowledge of the actual conformance, but arguments that give us guidance on what kind of conformance we target and how strict we'll be. The alternative is that we define our own subset of what we think is useful.

Database upgrades. Automatic QA for upgrade.

Cloud support

The biggest question here is: How will we align the roadmap of researching the cloud solution with the roadmap towards 5.0GA in november?

Query APIs

An important aspect of cloud is the query API. We currently plan to build out the query API similar to jBPM 4. For example

But that might be hard to implement on cloud persistence. Maybe there are solutions. MapReduce?